The Writer’s Purpose

At school my teacher tells us that the purposes for writing are to entertain, persuade, inform, teach, express, or a combination of some of the types. To some extent, this is right, and I say this because my English teacher is one of the smartest people I know and she’s referring to the rules made by our standardized tests.

But writing is more. We write because we can’t not write. We write because there is this thing inside of us that takes a physical toll on the well-being of our bodies if we don’t. We write because our fingers itch to write. We write because there is a desire to say something and mean something and be something. We write because we cannot say out loud what we want to say. We write because words are greater than us and in the end they immortalize the ideas we’ve had so the people of the future know what we were trying to say. We write because our emotions are not housed in our bodies or tears and so we pour them into words that are beautiful and create that emotion in others.